Re: Muammar hanging tough (fine looking daughter)
walt tonne
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371426/Libya-Gaddafis-glamor...
>
> (Uncle Suckemoff has spent over 1 billion on Libya. Meantime, our
> southern border is out of control)
Does anyone have a horse in this race?
Billy
<247bab28-d36d-4d21...@z3g2000prz.googlegroups.com>,
walt tonne <tonnew...@gmail.com> wrote:
You mean the $1 billion spent on another unnecessary war, or the
trillion$ stolen by "White Guys in Suits", or the desperate Mexicans who
are subsidizing with cheap labor, what's left of America's middle class?
I think that horse has gone to the glue factory.
Bush's 3rd term: Obama
If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
They paid for it in blood.
===
--
- Billy
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953
<http://wn.com/black_panther_party>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_vN0--mHug
Bryan
>
>
> If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
> They paid for it in blood.
Sometimes in the blood of capitalists. Union busting CEOs should be
terrorized, and perhaps tortured with the video put onto the web.
When union members got money, many of them broke solidarity. When non-
union retailers like Target started, union members should have used
arson, and perhaps even killing to shut them down. Instead they
fucking SHOPPED THERE! The only good Fascist is a dead Fascist. I'm
not going to thank some tradesman who makes five times what I do, then
turns around and votes Republican. Such a person is a traitor to his
class.
>
> ===
> --
> - Billy
--Bryan
Billy
<9b0b71b0-6ad5-4729...@o20g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>,
Bryan <bryang...@gmail.com> wrote:
How can you tell, if they vote Republican?
> >
> > ===
> > --
> > - Billy
>
> --Bryan
If you're not making $1 million/year, you'd have to be a fool to vote
Republican anyway. As the 2 parties merge to become the Kleptocrats, you
might be a fool to vote, unless it is for a third party candidate.
Obama is going to raise $1 billion for his re-election campaign?
He's not a man of my people.
--
<http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110310/WIRE/103101044/1036?Title=
Forbes-richest-list-Where-s-Jess-Jackson->
World's richest getting richer
At No. 1, Mexico's Carlos Slim added $20.5 billion to wealth
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 4:01 a.m.
The global ranks of billionaires grew by 199 people in the past year,
but none came close to unseating Carlos Slim, the world's richest man,
who added $20.5 billion to his coffers, according to Forbes magazine's
annual tally.
----
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/17/4627>
Published on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
What Do Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the USA Have in Common?
by Russell Mokhiber
What do Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the USA have in common?
A rapidly expanding billionaire class. Rampant poverty. And a distressed
middle class.
That's the take of Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter David
Cay Johnston in a soon to be released book - Free Lunch: How the
Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick
You with the Bill) (Portfolio, December 2007).
In it, Johnston seeks to afflict the comfortable top one tenth of one
percent of Americans -- the 300,000 men, women and children who last
year made more money than the bottom 150 million Americans.
Yes, we all have the right to vote and change this unbalanced state of
affairs.
But political power in the United States is exercised by this narrow,
rich segment of the population.
Much of the wealth transfer upstairs has come at the hands of corporate
welfare artists who have shifted billions from the middle class to the
billionaire class.
Some politician could take the central political issue of Free Lunch --
wealth inequality -- and run on it to the White House in 2008.
But the current crop of corporate candidates will likely ignore it so as
to not offend the funding class.
While Johnston focuses on the perfectly legal schemes that bloat the
richest of the richest at the expense of the rest of us, much of the
thievery he documents is the result of pure un-prosecuted or
under-prosecuted corporate criminality.
"One of the new rules has been to make sure there are far too few cops
on the beat on Wall Street to even write down all the legitimate
complaints, much less pursue more than a handful of evildoers," Johnston
writes. "More importantly, the actions of Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers and
the others were just part of a massive shift in practices and policies
that continue. The Wall Street scandals are not over. The conduct they
revealed is just becoming institutionalized."
"Thousands of executives at hundreds of companies took money from
shareholders through deliberate actions that distinguish them from
bandits only because they wielded pens instead of pistols," Johnston
writes. "The techniques are subtler and less overtly violent, but the
results are worse, for they undermine the legitimacy of society in ways
that street bandits do not. The rules allow this."
In the book, Johnston takes shots at the corporate criminal class that
would never make it by his editors at the New York Times.
"Unlike the common thief or bandit, these executives have the best and
the brightest lawyers to explain away misconduct or to obfuscate.," he
writes in the book. "In the rare instances when indictments are handed
up, the cheated shareholders sometimes end up paying to defend the
thieves who robbed them. Added to this are the legions of publicists who
are paid to report what their bosses want us to hear - the antithesis of
journalism's call to pursue the facts without fear or favor. The ranks
of these image shifters are growing, while across the country a quarter
or more of journalists are being fired, reducing further the chances
that inconvenient facts will become known."
"The checks and balances provided by oversight, inspection,
investigation and in extreme cases, prosecution have all been gutted in
the name of deregulation and shrinking the size of government," he
writes. "When there is no policeman on the beat the greatest beneficiary
is not the taxpayer who is relieved of the cost of maintaining the
police officer, but the thief."
Johnston points out that we used to prosecute loan sharks. But then we
got rid of usury laws and passed new laws that allow "Goldman Sachs and
Lehman Brothers, MBNA and Citibank to exploit the poor, the
unsophisticated and the foolish."
"These lenders, or their fronts, can now charge rates and impose
penalties that were illegal, even criminal, a generation a go," he says.
"The result? In the last 25 years or so, one American family in seven
has sought refuge in federal bankruptcy court. "
We've turned vices into pastimes. Case in point - gambling subsidized by
money that was promised to "help the poor, the elderly and the sick."
"In this way does Donald Trump take from the least among us to burnish
his image as a supposed billionaire," Johnston says.
In a different time, this book would climb the New York Times Best
Sellers list and stay at the top for a long time.
The bottom 150 million would read it and get angry.
And politics would go populist in 2008.
But as of now, Clarence Thomas, Alan Greenspan, and Ann Coulter are one,
two and three atop the Times non-fiction list.
Johnston's book won't be in bookstores until December.
Time for a change.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter,
<http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com>
-----
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government
Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) by David Cay Johnston
<http://www.amazon.com/Free-Lunch-Wealthiest-Themselves-Government/dp/B00
2CMLQXY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301520870&sr=1-1>
(Available at better libraries near you.)
Chapter 3
TRUST ANO CONSEQUENCES
HALF AN HOUR BEFORE DAYBREAK ABOARD THE AMTRAK SILVER
Star heading to New York from Florida, the South Carolina skies
were fair. The thermometer hovered comfortably in the low seventies.
It was the start of the glorious final day of July 1991.
The clickety-clack rhythm of the rails rocked the 407 passengers as
they dozed. Among them was Paul Palank, a Miami police sergeant on
his way to meet his wife and children for a family reunion near the
nation's capital. Palank loved trains as much as he feared flying.
At a minute past five, the train approached the town of Lugoff, a
farming community that the DuPont Company transformed into an
industrial center when it built a chemical plant there in 1948. The same
tracks that supported Palank and his fellow passengers on their journey
north often carried CSX railroad hopper cars filled with chemicals to
make Orion, a synthetic "miracle fiber" that came out of World War II
research. On a siding parallel to the Silver Star stood a string of empty
hopper cars waiting for a CSX train to haul them away to be refilled.
Freight traffic was so much more important, and more common, than
passenger trains that railroad companies didn't name the switch Lugoff
after the town, or even after the DuPont factory. Railroad engineers
called the train switch the Orion Crossing.
The Amtrak train was traveling two miles an hour below the posted
speed limit when the twin locomotives and the first twelve cars passed
over the Orion Crossing. Then the switch broke.
Six passenger cars hurtled off the tracks. The impact flipped over the
first hopper car, whose hardened steel wheels cut like a knife through
the
metal skin of the passenger cars. By the time everything came to a halt,
TRUST AND CONSEQUENCES 27
77 people were injured and 8 were dead, including Sergeant Palank. He
was 35 years old.
More than eight hours later, Angelica Palank arrived at the train
station in Alexandria, Virginia, to greet her husband. Eager to see him,
Angelica pushed her youngest son Taylor's stroller just as fast as five-
year-old Josef could move his little legs to keep up. As the family
waited
on the platform, a woman told Angelica that there had been an accident.
Angelica did not believe her. A northbound train approached and she felt
relieved. When it blew by the station, Angelica turned anxious. She and
the children hurried downstairs, hunting for the arrivals-and-departures
board. Train 82, the Silver Star, was not listed. She asked a ticket
clerk,
who gave her an 800 number to call. The clerk pointed the frantic young
mother to a pay telephone. A stranger's voice at the other end delivered
the horrible news.
In the weeks ahead the families of the injured and dead settled their
claims, discovering in the process how remarkably modest payments are
to the survivors of transportation crashes and to the heirs of those less
fortunate. Only Angelica Palank refused to go along. She did not believe
the crash was an accident. She did not believe her Paul died because
of some random bit of misfortune that no one could have seen coming.
Determined to learn all she could about how Paul was killed, Angelica
sued.
To get the truth Angelica Palank would have to put herself through
law school. She could never flinch as she took on one of the richest
corporations in America, a personal trial that extracted a heavy toll on
her
and her children. Ten relatives died in one year, but still she stuck to
hcr
cause. Friends and neighbors cut the grass and brought meals. At one
point, she nearly lost her home to unpaid property taxes. It was scary
and
nasty, as is all litigation about real wrongs. When she found lawyers
willing to take her case気hristian D. Searcy and F. Gregory Barnhart in
West Palm Beach逆heir work began to peel back layer upon layer upon
layer of corporate denials and superficial government inquiries. In time
they uncovered a trail pointing not to bad luck, but to policies with a
blatant disregard for safety.
The compulsion to increase profits can blind men to risk, especially
when those at risk are strangers. Society imposes rules on corporate
behavior to protect public safety in the face of baser impulses. These
rules
require enforcement, though. They also require a corporate culture that
appreciates the importance of safety. As Adam Smith wrote, "The object
28 FREE LUNCH
of justice is the security from injury, and it is the foundation of
civil
government."
For more than two decades, the ideology of blind faith in markets,
combined with the view that government is inherently inferior to self-
regulation, has caused politicians to trim enforcement funds. Trim long
enough and the little cuts sever muscle. Ultimately they slash to the
bone.
Such was the case in the derailment of the Silver Star. But it took one
diligent woman and her lawyers more than a decade to demonstrate how
harmful these ideas about trusting all companies to do right can be.
Before Angelica Palank's lawsuit got going in earnest, the National
Transportation Safety Board examined the crash. The investigators
quickly deduced that the accident was not a chance happening. Rather,
it resulted from improperly done repairs. Railroads詰ike airlines, meat-
packing plants, and other businesses where hidden dangers lurk菊mploy
inspectors to double-check what safety workers do. This saves lives and
avoids lawsuits. Yet the safety board found that the CSX inspectors
somehow failed to notice the Orion Crossing was in a dangerous state of
disrepair.
CSX maintenance crews had used shims to level the crossing, even
though the switch "is not designed for adjustment." Granite rock, known
as ballast, covered the wobbly switch mechanism. Once the investigators
cleared the ballast away, they found this vital switch was without a
proper
pin to hold the pieces in place. The switch "was held together with noth-
ing but a rusty nail. The safety board concluded that CSX inspectors
"could have and should have seen the switch deficiencies during a nor-
mal inspection and, with appropriate action, could have prevented the
accident."
Although businesses complain frequently about excessive government
paperwork, neither the railroad nor the Federal Railroad Administration,
the agency that is supposed to set and enforce safety standards,
required much recordkeeping. CSX's inspection process, the safety board
concluded, "lacked an adequate documentation procedure."
The roadmaster and some of the work crew used the jury-rigged
shims because their employer never allowed them. enough time or money
to do their jobs properly. CSX cut corners to inflate its profits, which
in
turn meant riches for its executives, whose pay packages were tied to
reported profits and the price of CSX shares.
John W. Snow, a lawyer and college economics professor who rose
TRUST AND CONSEQUENCES 29
to become the CSX chief executive, was an early champion of markets
as the most efficient regulator of transportation industries. It was an
idea
he promoted as an assistant secretary in President Ford's Transportation
Department before he joined the railroad. Under his leadership, the
railroad aggressively cut costs.
CSX publicists encouraged articles about Snow's drive for efficient
capital investment. Typical of the stories was one praising the company's
change from four engines to three on some hauls. These trains arrivcd
later, but still on time, while saving the cost and fuel of an entire
loco-
motive. His handlers did not make him available for stories about the
bridges that became eyesores after years, and then decades, without
paint-
ing. And in polishing Snow's image as a champion of efficiency, they
certainly did not encourage anyone to look at the systematic shortcuts in
safety.
Palank and her lawyers dug deep into the cutbacks in safety, deeper
than the National Transportation Safety Board. They looked for systemic
changes, for a pattern. Eventually they found CSX workers who would
talk: Allen Clamp and Robert Griffith.
For three years. Clamp was an apprentice foreman under Buster
Bowers, the roadmaster on the section of track in South Carolina where
Paul Palank died. Clamp testified that it should have been obvious to
CSX that there were too few men to perform the required safety
inspections and maintenance. In the crew's race to cover track as
quickly
as possible. Clamp testified that Bowers never "performed a disassembly
inspection, never walked a switch, and conducted no inspection, or
inadequate inspections." Clamp said under oath that Bowers even
directed him to fill out false inspection reports.
CSX tried to get this testimony thrown out. Five years had passed
between the time Clamp last worked under Bowers and the Lugoff crash.
CSX said that made the testimony ancient and unreliable. A Florida state
appeals court let the testimony stand, noting that the other rail worker,
Robert Griffith, confirmed that Bowers also had instructed him to falsify
inspection reports.
At trial, CSX urged jurors to not believe the former employees. One
Palank lawyer, Greg Bamhart had a counterargument: "CSX said, 'Why
would we do that?' We said it was to save $2.4 billion," the money CSX
had saved on maintenance.
In his own way, Barnhart was showing the jury the deadly effects of
30 FREE LUNCH
economic pollution. He explained how CSX benefited because it shifted
the cost of maintaining safe tracks off its owners and onto the
unsuspecting public, which unknowingly assumed a risk of injury or
death.
The first jury that heard the Palank case awarded the family $6.1
million as compensation for their loss. Then came the second trial before
a new jury, its purpose to determine whether CSX should be punished
on the theory that the Lugoff crash was the result of greed encouraging a
corporation to turn a blind eye to danger.
The second jury heard all about the $2.4 billion not spent between
1981 and 1993, most of those the years when Snow was fully in charge
of CSX. The jury heard how in 1987 the Federal Railroad Administration
had told CSX that its practices were unsafe. They heard how the
company stuck to its cost-cutting policies anyway.
Testimony showed that the National Transportation Safety Board
findings, alarming as they were, had missed much more damning facts. A
panel of three Florida judges later wrote that the Orion switch was
defective and the cross pin
had been broken for at least seven months prior to the derailment. The
Orion
switch had been installed backwards ten years earlier, and part of the
broken
cross pin was buried under several inches of [granite] ballast placed
between
the ties more than seven months prior to the derailment. The evidence
fur-
ther shows that a proper inspection would have revealed the broken cross
pin. In addition, there is evidence that CSX had actual knowledge that
the
cross pin was defective because the record shows that CSX periodically
greased a plate installed on the switch with graphite to make the switch
operate.
What that meant was that for a full decade CSX had escaped paying
the cost of repairing the Orion switch. Every day CSX trains loaded with
freight, including toxic chemicals, crossed the Orion switch. So did
Amtrak passengers, unaware they were riding over the equivalent of a
bomb waiting to go off.
The jurors were incensed. They awarded the widow and her children
$50 million in damages, taking 1 percent of CSX's net worth. The
jurors also wrote a note on the verdict form: "It is hoped that CSX
trainers will emphasize [the] need to inspect both ends of cross pins."
Judge Arthur J. Franza upheld the punitive damages award. He
delivered a stinging rebuke of CSX. "The clear and convincing evidence
TRUST AND CONSEQUENCES 31
shows that Silver Star No. 82's tragic derailment was caused by willful,
wanton negligence," Judge Franza wrote, adding that he considered the
railroad's conduct to be "borderline criminal."
"Clearly," the judge wrote, CSX "knew of the peril created by its
reductions and the company chose to proceed on its own course."
Then the appeals began. Three Florida judges who took up CSX's
pleas for relief ruled against the railroad. The judges said that
testimony
by former employees showed that "CSX knowingly endangered public
safety."
The judges called CSX's conduct a "flagrant violation of the public
trust . . . Keeping with the policy that punitive damages should punish
and deter, a jury of six reasonable persons concluded that $50 million
would adequately communicate to this defendant that this type of
reprehensible conduct should not and would not be tolerated."
The appeals court approvingly quoted Judge Franza, who ruled that
while CSX saved more than $2 billion, "society paid with eight human
lives. . . . The clear and convincing evidence showed that the price of
cost-cutting safety to turn over larger profits is too great of a
price."
CSX then appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, saying that its
conduct was reasonable. Further, any damage should be based only on
the value of the section of track near the crash site, not the company's
entire net worth. The Florida Supreme Court rejected CSX's claims.
Finally the litigation came to an end in early 2002, more than a decade
after Paul Palank's death, when the United States Supreme Court
said that it would not hear CSX's appeal.
Angelica Palank said she felt that she had accomplished her goals. She
had proven that the crash on luly 31, 1991, was not bad luck but the
predictable result of deliberate misconduct that flowed from the top of
the company. After paying her lawyers and income taxes on the punitive
damages, she donated the rest of the money to a foundation in her
husband's memory. Today a few million dollars remain to finance grants
for a cause her husband cared about deeply, abused and neglected
children in and around Miami.
CSX said it was disappointed that the Supreme Court would not
give it a chance to show that the jury and the Florida judges were wrong.
CSX even suggested the proper punitive damage was zero. Kathy Burns,
one of the CSX publicists, called the punitive damage award
"unwarranted and excessive."
Lobbyists from CSX and other companies had, in the meantime,
32 FREE LUNCH
descended on Tallahassee to persuade the state legislature that big puni-
tive damage awards were bad for business. Today Angelica Palank could
not get $50 million in punitive damages because of a law signed by
Governor Jeb Bush. It severely limited any future damage awards no
matter how awful the misconduct.
Even with the award that the courts left standing, the cold calculus
that cutting safety is immensely profitable remains in place. The total
damages to the Palank family, both to compensate them and to punish
the company, came to a bit more than $56 million. The money paid to
all of the others, who settled without litigation, was a fraction of
this.
Viewed in the context of what CSX saved, however, even the total
damages were not punishment at all, just a minor cost of doing business.
For every dollar CSX saved by cutting corners on safety it only had to
give back four cents.
We teach children that crime does not pay, but the grown-up truth
is that "borderline criminal" behavior can pay handsomely.
From the perspective of CSX, or any railroad, the economics of
shortchanging safety continue to make sense. Two years after the Palank
case ended, James E. Hall, a former chairman of the National
Transportation Safety Board, told The New York Times that the loss of
lives
in rail accidents reveals "a systemic failure . . . It's been something
that has
just not grabbed the attention, unfortunately, of the public." He was
speaking of deaths at rail crossings, but his point is equally valid
across
the board.
Although many travelers worry more, as Sergeant Palank did, about
dying in a plane crash or being hit by an 18-wheel rig on the highway,
since the year 2000 Americans have been dying at the rate of about one
per day at railroad crossings. A few of these deaths are suicides by
train or
the bloody product of fools driving around signal arms. Some are also the
result of crossing arms that fail to activate. Others occur because
signal
arms sometimes bob back up after coming down, endangering even careful
drivers and their passengers. At crossings with no signals, foliage that
the railroads have not trimmed in accordance with the rules add to the
death toll as people drive unaware onto tracks just as millions of pounds
of steel bear down on them. '
In Britain only about 18 people per year die at rail crossings. Major
crossings have fencelike barriers that cars cannot flit around. Even
after
taking into account that America has five times as many people as the
TRUST AND CONSEQUENCES 33
United Kingdom, the death rate at crossings in America is four times that
of Britain.
Between 1995 and 2000 derailments increased 28 percent, nearly
triple the 10 percent increase in freight hauled. Yet even with more
accidents and more deaths, the economics of cutting spending on safety
are compelling from the railroad's perspective. The fines imposed for
safety
violations in the United States are minor, more like parking tickets than
deterrents. The maximum fine is $20,000. The average fine is about
$1,600. So the railroads play the percentages, weighing risk versus cost.
Risk wins easily.
Most switches are safe. And not every unsafe switch will fail. Keeping
every one of the thousands of switches around the country in proper
repair is very costly, especially as a competitive market drives
transportation prices down. After all, the jury-rigged repair of the
backward
Orion switch held for years. Those switches that do fail will probably
damage
cargo, not kill people. Even killing people doesn't cost the railroads
very
much. As the CSX case demonstrated, all the injured and the families of
the dead except Angelica Palank accepted their modest settlements
quickly. So long as insurance costs less than repairs, this dangerous
trade-
off will continue no matter what the railroad industry says about its
commitment to safety.
Since the imperfect rules of the marketplace actually reward dangerous
risk taking, the only thing that could prevent this lethal gamble is
effective government regulation. In this century just 4 of the first
3,000
rail-crossing accidents were fully investigated because of ever-tighter
budgets for government safety offices. One railroad, Union Pacific, even
said that federal regulators were so overworked they told the railroad to
"stop calling" after every crash, which explained a big drop in minor
accidents it reported.
The industry, since 2001, has steadily tried to assure the public that
all is fine with the railroads because accident rates are falling. Then
came
eight CSX derailments in seven weeks as 2006 turned into 2007. That
prompted the Federal Railroad Administration to send inspectors out
across 23 states. Their inspections of CSX found more than 3,500
violations, 199 of them rated serious cases of failure to comply with
the
law.
What no one reported at the time is that railroads are by far the most
deadly form of commercial transportation in the country, the exact
opposite of the industry's carefully orchestrated campaign to deceive
with
34 FREE LUNCH
statistics. "Freight rail is by far the safest way to move goods and
products
across the country," the Association of American Railroads tells the
public.
Few people realize how deadly trains are because crashes usually
involve one or two deaths and thus get little attention in the news. They
also lack the emotional appeal of plane crashes, which fill us with a
sense
of dread because flying through the air at nearly the speed of sound
seems
to defy common sense.
Still, airliners are America's safest form of transportation by far. Some
600 million passengers board planes each year, yet often a year and
sometimes several years pass between fatal crashes. Big trucks kill about
5,100 people per year, trains about 930, and airliners about 140.
Measure deaths by the distance traveled, however, and trains are 52
times more deadly than trucks. Trains kill 130 people per 100 million
miles traveled, compared with 2.5 deaths in big-rig truck accidents and
1.9 deaths in plane crashes. Transportation Department statistics show.
It
is easy to miss that because the official government statistics use a
measure of only a million miles per accident for trains, but 100 million
miles
for trucks and airliners.
Bad as those official figures are, they severely understate how
dangerous
trains are. Truckers drive on highways surrounded by cars. Trains
run long stretches through rural areas where there are no crossings. In
such places a crash would hurt only the engineers on board and perhaps
some jackrabbits. If we had a measure of people killed per 100 million
miles of travel in-populated areas, where roads cross tracks and homes
are
almost as close by as freight cars parked on sidings, the death rate
would
be many times greater than the official figures.
Just as the CSX workers found ways to deal with demands that they
inspect more track in a shorter amount of time, government agencies
also adjust to unrealistic budgets. Some workers in private businesses
fake
reports and make slipshod repairs. The more noble of them work off the
clock if necessary in an attempt to set things right. Some CSX workers
testified that they worked extra hours for no pay, but that even these
efforts were not enough to overcome the callousness of the railroad's
management and its dogmatic belief in market ideology.
The government agencies, without anywhere near enough money to
oversee safety, play similar games. They tell Union Pacific to not call,
they write superficial reports, and when it comes to accidents at rail
crossings, they thoroughly investigate only 4 out of 3,000 cases.
TRUST AND CONSEQUENCES 35
These responses are human nature at work, as predictable as eating
when hungry. Give managers more than they can possibly do and they
will find a way to redefine their workload to what can be done. When
cuts in budget and personnel increase gradually, the public unwittingly
accepts unsafe conditions, just as the clickety-clack of the rails
lulled
passengers into sleep until the Orion Crossing's deadly repairs gave
way.
Even a reliable system of safety rules means nothing, however, if
there are no consequences for misconduct. At the end of the day, after
litigation that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, for
CSX there were no consequences. CSX paid nothing for its
recklessness.
CSX simply sent a bill to Amtrak seeking reimbursement. It sought,
and got, the full amount it had paid to the injured and the families of
the
dead. Amtrak even paid the $50 million that the jury ordered to punish
CSX. Since the government owns Amtrak, what CSX did, in effect, was
to stick the taxpayers with its bill.
The jurors, though, had no idea. Reporter Walt Bogdanich, who
won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing unsafe rail conditions, grows animated
when he describes "this sham trial, an absolute sham in which everyone
on the jury thought CSX was being punished and CSX knew that no
matter what happened it would not cost them one cent."
When Amtrak was formed in 1971, the freight railroads persuaded
Congress to let them stop carrying passengers. But they wanted more
than to shed that obligation. The freight railroads wanted to be
insulated
from any claims arising from Amtrak using their rails. The railroads
reasonably sought not to be responsible for claims arising out ot
misconduct by Amtrak. A crash caused by a drunken Amtrak engineer
or a badly repaired axle on a passenger train should be paid for by
Amtrak.
Congress looked out for the freight railroads, which unlike Amtrak
were a vibrant source of campaign support. A federal law shields the
freight railroads from claims by Amtrak passengers and anyone hurt by an
Amtrak tram. Under federal law all claims arising from Amtrak passengers,
even in cases where Amtrak was not at fault, must be paid by Amtrak.
Under these rules it does not matter that Amtrak did nothing wrong,
its trains traveling below the speed limit, its crew alert and sober,
its rolling
stock in sound condition. It does not matter that the courts found the
cause of Paul Palank's death was CSX's reckless disregard for human life.
Under the contract, all that matters is, at the moment the rails or a
switch
36 FREE LUNCH
or a shoddy repair job gives way, does the train passing overhead belong
to Amtrak? Only if a freight train is overhead when the failure occurs is
the freight railroad on the hook for the damages.
What this means is that CSX and John Snow got a free lunch. You
got stuck with their bill.
Economists have a term. for situations in which someone gets rewards
but has little or no incentive to avoid risk: a moral hazard. The term is
usually applied in insurance cases. A policy that covers every cent with
no deductible may cause people to be less vigilant about husbanding their
lives or property. A policy may even encourage the unscrupulous to burn
down a failing store to collect the insurance money and avoid
bankruptcy. We are reminded of this most often by those exposes on local
television in which a hidden camera captures a firefighter or
construction
worker building a brick wall in his backyard at a time when lie was
collecting workers' compensation. What we seldom see exposed are the
roofing contractors whose disability insurance forms list 35 low-risk
secretaries and 1 high-risk roofer, allowing them to cheat on their
premiums.
Those who occupy the executive suite and gamble millions of dollars
on tlie lives of others are rarely seen as engaged in morally hazardous
conduct. Yet reward without risk is a form of moral hazard that blinds us
to the consequences of our acts. The trade-off between safety and stock
price is an important part of the story of how the ideology of blind
faith
in markets is remaking America. But the moral hazards of this blind faith
are not limited to cutting corners on safety. We also have rules that
encourage a new way to make the rich richer at the expense of working
people. It is a strategy called labor arbitrage.
-----
Bush's 3rd term: Obama
If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
They paid for it in blood.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair>
John Gilmer
>
> "Thousands of executives at hundreds of companies took money from
> shareholders through deliberate actions that distinguish them from
> bandits only because they wielded pens instead of pistols," Johnston
> writes. "The techniques are subtler and less overtly violent, but the
> results are worse, for they undermine the legitimacy of society in ways
> that street bandits do not. The rules allow this."
>
> In the book, Johnston takes shots at the corporate criminal class that
> would never make it by his editors at the New York Times.
>
> "Unlike the common thief or bandit, these executives have the best and
> the brightest lawyers to explain away misconduct or to obfuscate.," he
> writes in the book. "In the rare instances when indictments are handed
> up, the cheated shareholders sometimes end up paying to defend the
> thieves who robbed them. Added to this are the legions of publicists who
> are paid to report what their bosses want us to hear - the antithesis of
> journalism's call to pursue the facts without fear or favor. The ranks
> of these image shifters are growing, while across the country a quarter
> or more of journalists are being fired, reducing further the chances
> that inconvenient facts will become known."
The "funny thing" was that in the age of the "robber barrons" most of the
elite were only one generation away from poverty. There wasn't an income
tax so successful folks were able to accumulate "significant" fortunes
rapidly. The major "investors" were simply the representatives of the
second generation "very rich." Middle class folks tended to enjoy where
they were or started their own businesses. They seldom were interested in
placing the family welfare in the hands of some distant corporation.
Both 19th Century and 20th/21st Century Robber Barrons have contributed much
more to society than they took away.
But what's realy amazing is how quickly the 19th Century capitalists were
able to bring resources to the then "new technology."
Billy
"John Gilmer" <jlgi...@localnet.com> wrote:
And I hope they burn in hell.
Catawumpus
> If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
> They paid for it in blood.
That was nearly a hundred years ago. By now those numbers
should be closer to zero.
-- Catawumpus
Billy
Catawumpus <kimm...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
In other fast breaking news . . .
<http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t787823/>
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/17/online-persona-management_n_837
153.html>
U.S. Military Launches Spy Operation Using Fake Online Identities
Online Persona Management
The Huffington Post Amy Lee First Posted: 03/17/11 02:11 PM Updated:
03/17/11 02:11 PM
The U.S. Military has purchased software designed to create and control
false online personas in an attempt to use social media and other
websites to counter anti-U.S. messaging.
According to the contract between US Central Command (Centcom) and
California company Ntrepid, the software would let each user control 10
personas, each "replete with background, history, supporting details,
and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically
consistent." The software would also be able to let personas "appear to
originate in nearly any part of the world" and interact through
"conventional online services and social media platforms," while using a
static IP address for each persona to maintain a consistent online
identity.
(cont.)
-
If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
They paid for it in blood.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair>
===
--
- Billy
Dept. of Defense budget: $663.8 billion
Dept. of Health and Human Services budget: $78.4 billion
Catawumpus
Billy <Wild...@withouta.net>:
> If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
> They paid for it in blood.
The 8-hour day and 40-hour week are close to a century old.
Not much progress in reducing them since then, so no thanks
due to unions or anybody else. ObBook: Studs Terkel, _Working_.
-- Catawumpus
Billy
Catawumpus <kimm...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
Funny you should mention Studs. You must know that he was as ardent an
labor union supporter as you could find. You must be thinking of the
National Association of Manufacturers.
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded in Cincinnati,
Ohio, in 1895. Most fundamentally, the organization sought to give
business an authoritative voice in the determination of governmental
policy. More particularly, born in the midst of the serious depression
of the mid-1890s, the NAM was dedicated initially to the protection of
the home market via the tariff and to the expansion of foreign trade by
such means as reform of the counselor service, the construction of an
isthmian canal, and a revamping of the U.S. merchant marine. In the wake
of the anthracite coal strike of 19021903, the association increasingly
turned its attention to combating the rise of organized labor. During
the 1920s, the NAM became a national leader in the business drive for
the open shop. The Great Depression hit the organization hard, however,
and its membership and revenues dropped precipitously.
The NAM retrenched and reasserted itself in the mid-1930s as the chief
business opponent of New Deal liberal activism. Its shrill nay-saying
failed to stop the torrent of reform legislation, but the organization
gained an enduring reputation for ideological rigor in its denunciation
of government regulation and the emergent welfare state.
In the postwar era the NAM played a significant role in the passage of
the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which placed new limits on organized
labor. Thereafter, the association remained one of the nation's most
prominent business lobbies, usually taking a harder, more ideological
line than such accommodationist, big-business groups as the Business
Roundtable. In 1974 the NAM moved its national headquarters from New
York City to Washington, D.C. At the end of the twentieth century the
organization had 14,000 member firms, including 10,000 small and midsize
companies, and 350 member associations.
Bibliography
Collins, Robert M. The Business Response to Keynes, 19291964. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1981.
Steigerwalt, Albert K. The National Association of Manufacturers,
18951914: A Study in Business Leadership. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1964.
Vogel, David. Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in
America. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
-----
--------
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/national-association-of-m_1_b
_816709.html>
Manufacturing in Decline; Establishment in Denial
Posted: 02/ 1/11 08:23 AM ET
The National Association of Manufacturers is trying to pull another fast
one.
Consider this presentation in favor of the proposed Korea-U.S. Free
Trade Agreement.
<http://www.nam.org/~/media/44DAEAA5A9044A62AD269C6E5270749E/FTAs_and_Job
s.pdf>
Let's take it apart, shall we?
(cont.)
Bush's 3rd term: Obama
If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
They paid for it in blood.
Catawumpus
>> The 8-hour day and 40-hour week are close to a century old.
>> Not much progress in reducing them since then, so no thanks
>> due to unions or anybody else. ObBook: Studs Terkel, _Working_.
Billy <Wild...@withouta.net>:
> Funny you should mention Studs. You must know that he was as ardent an
> labor union supporter as you could find.
Terkel supported labor unions -- not laboring. Here's how
_Working_ starts:
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature,
about violence逆o the spirit as well as to the body.
It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting
matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns
as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all
(or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive
the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among
the great many of us.
The less of that the better, eh? He allows for "the happy
few who find a savor in their daily job," but strongly
emphasizes that most people aren't half so lucky about how they
get to spend their time.
As the automated pace of our daily jobs wipes out name
and face蟻nd, in many instances, feeling逆here is a
sacrilegeous question being asked these days. To earn
one's bread by the sweat of one's brow has always been
the lot of mankind. At least, ever since Eden's
slothful couple was served with an eviction notice. The
scriptural precept was never doubted, not out loud. No
matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls
the senses and breaks the spirit, one must work. Or
else.
Lately there has been a questioning of this "work
ethic," especially by the young. Strangely enough, it
has touched off profound grievances in others, hitherto
devout, silent, and anonymous. Unexpected precincts are
being heard from in a show of discontent. Communique's
from the assembly line are frequent and alarming:
absenteeism. On the evening bus, the tense, pinched
faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell
us more than we care to know. On the expressways,
middle management men pose without grace behind their
wheels as they flee city and job.
Studs Terkel, _Working_ xiii-xiv
-- Catawumpus
Bryan
I'm disappointed too, but Obama, Clinton and Carter have all had to
deal with the electorate, which is nowhere near as progressive as you
or I. To publicly brand Democratic presidents as Republican Lite
doesn't serve the interests of working class folks.
>
> If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), then thank a labor union.
> They paid for it in blood.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair>
Gen. Patton said that it wasn't the soldier's job to die for his
country, but to make his opponent die for *his* country. Perhaps the
solution is to make the oligarch die for his wealth. Maybe the best
defense is a good offense.
>
> ===
> --
> - Billy
>
> Dept. of Defense budget: $663.8 billion
> Dept. of Health and Human Services budget: $78.4 billion
>
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
> - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953
If only the modern day Republicans longed for the days of the
Eisenhower presidency instead of taking a shit upon those words...
--Bryan
moronsbegone
>
> And I hope they burn in hell.
If that be the case then why are you using the internet and a
computer? Come to think of it it's an awfully Capatilist thing
to do but easy to hide behind the social mask of "I only use
it to talk to people?"
Personally I don't think the capitalists are the monsters, The
Mystic minds trying to parasite off of others?? Now thats a
problem.
QUOTE
"If a little Girl sells coolaid at the corner of a busy street
and makes 5 dollars, I am not entitled to it. SHE IS."
--
Quote "Get SSL VPN services now, KEEP Government OUT of your
business... "
Billy
moronsbegone <NoT...@never.org> wrote:
And who paid for the street corner, and who makes it a busy street?
No man, or little girl, is an island.
Let's not for get to keep business out of government, too. Whoops, guess
its too late for that now.
--
- Billy
Bush's 3rd term: Obama plus another elective war
Bush's 4th term: another Judas goat
America is not broke. The country is awash in wealth and cash.
It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the
greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks
and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
<http://theuptake.org/2011/03/05/michael-moore-the-big-lie-wisconsin-is-broke/>